Thailand floods are affecting some iMac shipments

The recent flooding in Thailand has put hard drives in short supply and driven costs up considerably. It seems that the shortage of HDDs is finally trickling down to Apple, causing a shipping delay on certain build to order iMac models.

Image courtesy of AppleInsider

AppleInsider first reported on the shipping delay, noting it seems to only affect iMac models with a 2TB hard drive added on to them. Adding that drive pushes the shipping time of the computer out by 5-7 weeks as opposed to the few days that the build to order iMacs usually take to ship.

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Interestingly enough, adding up to four, 2TB drives to Mac Pros does not cause the same shipping delay. That suggests that Apple is diverting the majority of their 2TB drive stock to the Mac Pros and making iMac buyers wait longer to get their new computers.

Apple has yet to comment on exactly how the HDD shortage is affecting them but CEO Tim Cook did mention the flooding at an October 18 earnings call, only days after the tragedy occurred. Cook said, "It is something I'm concerned about. We do expect -- I'm virtually certain there will be an overall industry shortage of disk drives as a result of the disaster. How it affects Apple, I'm not sure."

The HDD supply issues are expected to carry over until at least first quarter of 2012. Western Digital announced that it was finally resuming production at one of its facilities, but that supply was expected to still be an issue for at least the next quarter. Hopefully the shortage will end within the next quarter or so. I would personally love to see HDD prices driven back down so I can add some storage to my home NAS.

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